No Appetite for Prosecution: In Memoir, Bush Admits He Authorized the Use of Torture, But No One Cares

6.11.10

With just days to go before George W. Bush’s memoir, Decision Points, hits bookstores (on November 9), and with reports on the book’s contents doing the rounds after review copies were made available to the New York Times and Reuters, it will be interesting to see how many media outlets allow the former President the opportunity to try to salvage his reputation, how many are distracted by his spat with Kanye West or his claim that he thought about replacing Dick Cheney as Vice President in 2004, and how many decide that, on balance, it would be more honest to remind readers and viewers of the former President’s many crimes — including the illegal invasion of Iraq, and the authorization of the use of torture on “high-value detainees” seized in the “War on Terror.”

As I fall firmly into the latter camp, this article focuses on what little has so far emerged regarding the President’s views on Guantánamo, and, in particular, on his confession that he authorized the waterboarding of “high-value detainee” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, which is rather more important than trading blows with a rapper about whether or not his response to the Katrina disaster was racist, as it is a crime under domestic and international law.

As Michiko Kakutani explained in a review of the book for the New York Times:

He tries to play down the problems of Guantánamo Bay, writing that detainees were given “a personal copy of the Koran” and access to a library among whose popular offerings was “an Arabic translation of Harry Potter.”

On torture

On torture, however, Bush remains as casual about authorizing waterboarding (a form of controlled drowning used on at least three “high-value detainees” held in secret CIA prisons), as he did in June this year, when he told the Economic Club of Grand Rapids, Michigan, “Yeah, we waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. I’d do it again to save lives.”

In his book, he writes that his response, when asked if he would approve the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was, “Damn right!” He added, “Had I not authorized waterboarding on senior al-Qaeda leaders, I would have had to accept a greater risk that the country would be attacked.”

On Thursday, Reuters revealed more about the passages in the book in which Bush discusses waterboarding. This largely revisits the scenario as he described it in a press conference in September 2006, when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri (the three men waterboarded by the CIA), plus 11 other “high-value detainees,” were transferred to Guantánamo from the secret CIA prisons whose existence, until that moment, had been strenuously denied by the administration.

On that occasion, he spoke at length about Abu Zubaydah, the supposed “high-value detainee” for whom the torture program was specifically developed, who, according to the “torture memos” released last year (written by lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2002 and 2005) was waterboarded 83 times.

Revisiting his claims that, “When Abu Zubaydah stopped answering questions from the FBI, CIA Director George Tenet told Bush he thought the detainee had more information to offer” (as Reuters described it), Bush explains that “CIA and Justice Department lawyers conducted a careful legal review and came up with an ‘enhanced interrogation program,’ which he said complied with the US Constitution and all applicable laws, including those that ban torture.”

“No doubt the procedure was tough, but medical experts assured the CIA that it did no lasting harm,” Bush writes, adding that the methods were “highly effective,” and that Abu Zubaydah “revealed large amounts of information about al-Qaeda’s structure as well as the location of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who he called the logistical planner of September 11 attacks” — an analysis that is unconvincing, as FBI interrogator Ali Soufan explained in an op-ed for the New York Times in April 2009. Soufan wrote:

Defenders of these techniques have claimed that they got Abu Zubaydah to give up information leading to the capture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a top aide to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed … This is false. The information that led to Mr. Shibh’s capture came primarily from a different terrorist operative who was interviewed using traditional methods.

Bizarrely, Bush also attempts to explain how Abu Zubaydah began cooperating, in a troubling passage in which he seems to be trying to make out that waterboarding was some sort of specific test for Muslims. He writes, “His understanding of Islam was that he had to resist interrogation only up to a certain point. Waterboarding was the technique that allowed him to reach that threshold, fulfill his religious duty, and then cooperate.” He adds that Abu Zubaydah then explained, “You must do this for all the brothers.”

Writing of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times, according to the OLC memos, Bush describes him as “difficult to break,” as Reuters put it, “but when he did, he gave us a lot.” As Reuters explained, “He disclosed plans to attack American targets with anthrax and ‘directed us to three people involved in the al-Qaeda biological weapons program,’ among other breakthroughs.”

Again, this is a claim that is not backed up with any evidence. As David Rose explained in an article for Vanity Fair in December 2008, “according to a former senior CIA official, who read all the interrogation reports on KSM, ‘90 percent of it was total f*cking bullsh*t.’ A former Pentagon analyst adds: ‘KSM produced no actionable intelligence. He was trying to tell us how stupid we were.’”

In conclusion, however, Bush claims that “the CIA interrogation program saved lives,” as Reuters described it, and states, “Had we captured more al-Qaeda operatives with significant intelligence value, I would have used the program for them as well.”

Why waterboarding is torture, and torture is a crime

The problem with Bush’s off-hand acknowledgment that he authorized the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — and Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri — is that waterboarding is torture, and torture is a crime.

As Isabel Macdonald of FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) explained in 2008 in an excellent overview of US reporting on waterboarding, “During the insurrection against the US occupation of the Philippines, the Washington Post described how the US military tortured suspected members of the Filipino resistance using “the form of torture known as the water cure.” That was in September 1902, but after the Second World War, when US military tribunals tried Japanese military officials for war crimes for torturing prisoners of war with techniques including waterboarding, the New York Times described the procedure as “forced drownings,” and it was referred to by the Washington Post as “water torture.”

Similarly, in March 1968:

“water torture” was mentioned in the headline of a Washington Post article about the Australian army’s admission that a soldier had administered the “water treatment” to a Vietnamese woman suspected of being a guerilla. Six months later, the Post published a front-page photographic exposé of US soldiers administering this same “water treatment” to a Vietnamese prisoner. A follow-up report in the Post [in 1970] referred to this practice, which resulted in charges against the commander of the US Army troops in South Vietnam, as “an ancient Oriental torture called ‘the water treatment.’”

Moreover, when it comes to torture in more general terms, the US anti-torture statute (Title 18, Part I, Chapter 113C of the US Code, introduced in 1994) describes torture as “an act … specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering … upon another person within his custody or physical control,” and, as I explained in an article in July this year about Jay S. Bybee, the former OLC head (and now a judge in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals) who signed his name to the most notorious of the “torture memos,” written by John Yoo in the summer of 2002:

The US anti-torture statute [also] requires a fine, or 20 years’ imprisonment (or both) for “[w]hoever outside the United States commits or attempts to commit torture,” and a death sentence, or a prison sentence up to and including a life sentence, “if death results to any person from conduct prohibited by this subsection.”

In addition:

The UN Convention Against Torture [ratified by Ronald Reagan in 1987] stipulates (Article 2.2), “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” Moreover, the Convention also stipulates (Article 4. 1) that signatories “shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law” and requires each State, when torture has been exposed, to “submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution” (Article 7.1).

These facts are generally ignored by mainstream media outlets, where those in charge have, since 2004, when waterboarding under the Bush administration was first introduced to the US public, coyly — and deceptively — chosen to refer to it as “a form of simulated drowning condemned by human rights activists as torture” (as Reuters did on Thursday), thereby helping to foster the culture of impunity which has allowed Bush to make this statement so publicly, and which, in February, allowed Dick Cheney to tell Jonathan Karl, on ABC News’ “This Week,” “I was a big supporter of waterboarding.”

Why the Obama administration bears responsibility for Bush’s impunity

In addition, the Obama administration is also responsible. Neither President Obama nor Attorney General Eric Holder has chosen to hold Bush administration officials and lawyers — up to and including the former President — accountable for their crimes, even though, as I explained in an article in March 2009:

In an interview with ABC News on January 11, 2009, President-Elect Obama responded to a recent CBS interview with Dick Cheney, in which the then-Vice President had sounded his usual alarms about the need for “extraordinary” policies to deal with terror suspects, by stating, “Vice President Cheney I think continues to defend what he calls extraordinary measures or procedures and from my view waterboarding is torture. I have said that under my administration we will not torture.”

Two days later, at his confirmation hearing, Eric Holder reinforced Obama’s opinion. Noting, as the New York Times described it, that waterboarding had been used to torment prisoners during the Inquisition, by the Japanese in World War II and in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, and adding, “We prosecuted our own soldiers for using it in Vietnam,” he stated unequivocally, “Waterboarding is torture,” and reiterated his opinion on March 2, 2009, in a speech to the Jewish Council of Public Affairs in Washington. “Waterboarding is torture,” he said again, adding, “My Justice Department will not justify it, will not rationalize it and will not condone it.”

Instead, after a promising start on torture, which involved the President upholding the absolute ban on torture in an executive order issued on his second day in office, and the release of the OLC “torture memos” last April, in response to a court order, the Obama administration has retreated to a place where every attempt to seek accountability for the Bush administration’s torturers has been resolutely blocked.

In January this year, it was revealed that Holder had appointed — or had allowed — the veteran Justice Department fixer David Margolis to override the conclusions of a four-year internal investigation into the behavior of John Yoo and Jay Bybee, in which the author’s conclusions — that both men had been willfully guilty of “professional misconduct” — were watered down so that they were merely reprimanded for exercising “poor judgment.”

In addition, the administration’s stock response to attempts to investigate torture claims in court — as, for example, in the cases of five men subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and torture, who sought to sue Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., a Boeing subsidiary that acted as the CIA’s torture travel agent — has been to slam all the doors shut mercilessly, inappropriately invoking the little-known “state secrets” privilege to prevent anyone with a valid complaint from even getting anywhere near a court.

This is unlikely to change in the near future, of course, leaving George W. Bush able to boast openly about his crimes, apparently secure in the knowledge that he is untouchable, although as David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University, and a long-standing critic of the Bush administration’s interrogation and detention policies, told the Washington Post on Thursday, “The fact that he did admit it suggests he believes he is politically immune from being held accountable … But politics can change.”

At present, it is difficult to see how, but those compiling evidence will have taken note that, in the very public forum of an internationally available memoir, George W. Bush has failed to rehabilitate his legacy and has, instead, openly confessed to war crimes.

Note: For a perceptive analysis of George W. Bush’s thoughts about his responsibility for the Iraq fiasco, see this post by Amy Davidson of the New Yorker.

It is important to note that former President Bush has filled in the last link showing the medical complicity with torture was integral to the program and went to the very top, not incidental and not the actions of a few miscreant physicians or psychologists. As he put it in an interview posted on CNN yesterday, “Another technique was waterboarding, a process of simulated drowning. No doubt the procedure was tough, but MEDICAL EXPERTS [added emphasis] assured the CIA that it did no lasting harm.”

Previously, medical complicity had been traced as high as Rumsfeld and to the CIA administrative structure. Now it goes further.

In this sense, the silence of groups like the AMA, the Institute of Medicine becomes more noteworthy and more culpable. In holding to standards against clinicians who participate in torture that are not backed up with accountability, in a silence that implies that the structural participation in torture is a political matter rather than the destruction of medical ethics, in holding to what now is a contemptible rationalization that the torture was the results of few bad apples, US medicine had separated itself from physicians who are fighting torture in Turkey and Egypt and is utterly unable to speak on behalf of their cause or protection.

Thanks, Steven. That’s a very important point, which I was anticipating that you and other medical experts would pick up on. Looking forward to this discussion not slipping away after a few days of the relentless news-cycle of what investigative journalist Nick Davies very aptly calls “churnalism.”

the thing with torture is to be quite honest, after a while, the tortured party will either develop more distaste for you if they are innocent or become deranged or indeed become more extreme or just destroyed. There is so much that should never happen, but when people realise they can play God, they get carried away…..

No, Christine, Bush doesn’t have big “you know whats”. Only a coward would, to use Andys words, “boast” about what is essentially state-sponsored kidnap (via extraordinary rendition) and torture of those in U.S. custody, on the strong (albeit erroneous) assumption that those responsible, at the highest levels, would never be prosecuted. There is nothing ‘brave’ about that.

I know you’re not saying he is ‘brave’, but saying he has a big pair of cojoñes kind of implies that; and he deserves no such literal nor proverbial accolades!

Vile, idiotic, redneck coward/crusader, maybe. But not someone who should be thought of as “having big ones”.

Let me say something of the arrogant men in texas who King GWB allowed to do the worse act in the world based on an entitlement attitude of a cultivated mindset..

I will rape you with a big smile on my face -And I hope it gives you hell-

The US had agents who bragged and gave high fives.. well documented.. That is Why FBI Director Mueller spoke to Congress and stated DOD agents wanted to torture.. mostly WANTED to Torture and had Bybee and YOO write the directives

Thanks, everyone. And Jennifer, I also have a little one in my family. It’s bad enough that he has grown up with permanent war, without the presumption, as well, that he is supposed to put up with leaders bragging about how they authorized torture.
Perhaps if the establishment had its way, children would learn in school,
“We do not torture. What some people call torture — waterboarding — is in fact “a form of simulated drowning condemned by human rights activists as torture,” which was approved by lawyers as a legitimate “enhanced interrogation technique” in the “War on Terror.”

The Bush crowd might never be held to account by their own people, but there are other countries where the authorities are less permissive. Foreign travel is already risky for many of them. Don’t be surprised if the Bush family returns from a trip someday minus George.

The only problem with that idea is that the usa is very likely to attack any other nation that puts that son of a bitch on trial for the crimes he boasts about committing. The real reason that no nation is going to arrest the bush crooks, is that we’d be nuked if we did act so foolishly.

Of course many people care, millions of people here and around the world want Cheney/Bush/Rummie and the gang to be strung up in public.

However, our dear leaders in the D party took investigation off the table, prosecution off the table. Obomber took a line from Tony Blair and said we have to move forward, you know, move forward to the way forward, not look back to the past. We don’t need no history.

So now criminals like Bush and Blair are getting photo-ops, selling books, and making tidy sums of money as their rewards. Instead of execution or life prison sentences they are rewarded with lots of money and fame. Pretty nice deal eh?

Now we can add the Obama regime, Nancy Pelosi and other D leaders to the list of War Criminals and lying scum who are accomplices to Treason and perpetrators of Crimes Against Humanity.

One of the judges at Nuremberg said that any state, any government, that makes war on another, that tortures and murders, should be tried for those offenses, including the United States, should it perpetrate similar crimes.

We need a new Nuremberg, but the world would have to rise up against us as they did against the Axis. Once more, the world would have to put a generation of its brightest and best into the trenches, into the cauldron of war, against an enemy as cruel and venal as Nazi Germany, but with weapons Hitler could only dream of.

As I have written before, We the People have become We the Sheeple. We are in the process of being turned from citizens to serfs and, few even see it coming. They just follow the nice goat with the bell up the ramp and through the doors of the abattoir.

After the so-called election of 2000, I told a friend;
“About 10 years from now they will be saying, they Impeached Clinton for What? And didn’t Impeach Bush for What?”

I didn’t know what he would do, but knew he would so something truly stupid.

There are many books that say the CIA and others gave the White House a lot of intelligence that said there was no WMD but damn the facts, he had to go after the guy that tried to kill his Daddy (that wasn’t much more than a bad rumor, they never really tied anything to Saddam).

I’m not a conspiracy pundit, but gee whiz W sure is lucky. If the economy was good when Obama took office, I think looking into the crimes of W and the gang would have been an easy move. Instead we give the guy 18 months and if he doesn’t turn everything around, we put the criminals who got us in this mess back in power.

George Wanker Bush will always be the Rotting National Pumpkin whose face was carved by Joseph Stalin. A hundred years from now on Halloween, the average American serf will stroll by the White House and see the Wanker’s grotesque orange smirk looking out at them from the sill of a top floor window, a candle guttering inside, mocking them all.

The Clinton administration attacked Iraq twice a week on average, knocking out mostly civilian facilities, water treatment plants, electrical generating plants, dairies. The purpose, the STATED purpose, was to cause the deaths of so many sub-5 year olds that the Iraqis would rebel. Madeleine Albright agreed (in a 60 Minutes interview). Since these are also war crimes, Clinton should join W in the dock at the Hague. Now, Obama and his Pakistan drone war…

Wrong. We care. The SOB has wounded the world with mortal sin and dire evils cast in our name. Our collective American desire to do good things in this world was subverted by him. How to calculate the dastardly opinion of our country now? He set us back centuries. He could only do that with an inflated sense of military power and might and a reptilian brain- to murder so many in shock and awe. To torture. He will go to hell and join Hussein there. But, we own his evil. The guy is the devil incarnate. We allowed it. He and his complicit administration and the war-makers should be tried for treason and imprisoned. US leaders OWN his actions. It is up to Obama to prove that we are NOT Bush.That Bush is not above the law. The American people must not allow such evil and crime in their name. Open up the Justice department investigations now.. or get out of leading- we don’t need more bad example.

America would be foolish to allow this to go unanswered. You should be tried for War Crimes in the Hague. Torture is torture is terrorism, is never justifiable, and never leads to peace of any kind for anyone.

Thank you for not making America any safer. Fighting terrorism with terrorism is no way to put out a fire, but it certainly is one way to get an invitation to the Hague.

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Investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. Recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror.” Co-founder, Close Guantánamo, co-director, We Stand With Shaker. Also, singer and songwriter (The Four Fathers) and photographer. Email Andy Worthington